Greetings, I am a developer who's kindly interested in contributing to the Apache FOP project. I hope this message finds you well.
I would like to propose code changes I have made to synchronize the Apache FOP project to PDFBox version "3.0.2-SNAPSHOT". That is, my draft is based on a commit in the Apache "pdfbox" project repository "3.0" branch, subsequent to release tag "3.0.1" and with numerous common changes that the PDFBox project has also been using for the "trunk" branch for currently unreleased PDFBox version 4.0.0 development. My draft contains changes to the "xmlgraphics-fop" and "xmlgraphics-fop-pdf-images" repositories in the FOP project, along with concomitant necessary changes in the dependency "pdfbox" project repository. I developed on the PDFBox "3.0" branch in particular, rather than "trunk", because I understand that PDFBox major version 4 breaks compatibility with Java versions prior to 11, and I'm unsure that the FOP project would currently be prepared to do that as well. However, hopefully synchronizing FOP with the PDFBox major version 3 development track will make the collective codebase largely interoperable with the newfangled PDFBox versions 4.* / current trunk development as well. There are some relevant upgrades/adjustments to unit-tests in addition to main production code. My fixes also address miscellaneous issues and cleanup, for instance with outstanding logging-sensitive bugs. Before I post/submit any changes, I would like to kindly obtain verification of whether this sort of upgrade to the FOP project would be welcomed. I would be honored for my changes to be accepted and assimilated. Because my changes impact two (2) separate but related Apache Software Foundation projects, I would appreciate if the committer team could please let me know the best way to post or submit this draft corresponding to each of the three (3) Git repositories. For instance, please let me know if there is a preference between posting a JIRA ticket, cross-project pair of JIRA tickets, GitHub pull requests, etc. Thank you in advance for considering this proposal and providing feedback. Sincerely, Mark E.
